Page 3182 - Week 10 - Thursday, 16 September 1993
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Their membership of the scheme is not pivotal for it to continue, whereas ours is. There probably are other devices, under the Constitution or elsewhere, for there to be a national scheme of this kind, but that may not be convenient for us to adopt in this case. It certainly is not what we are doing in this particular case and, therefore, would not be of help to us should we decide to pull out.
I do not see that this is a matter in which we are going to have any great problems in the immediate future, and my party therefore supports the concept of proceeding down this path. But I do sound the warning that, as more and more of these kinds of schemes come into force and on more and more occasions the ACT in a sense becomes the pivotal player in national schemes through the use of section 122 of the Constitution, we will find circumstances where our freedom to make laws which we consider appropriate for the ACT is diminished and people will say to us, "We should not have handed over this power. We should have retained control over these matters". It may be that decades from now people will say, "The rot began with schemes like the national agricultural and veterinary chemicals scheme".
I hope that that is not the case. I hope that we derive only benefits from this arrangement. But I do think that in each individual case we have to exercise our judgment about whether we allow the Commonwealth to use its power to make laws of this kind. If we exercise that judgment in each individual case with great care, as I think the Chief Minister indicated she intends to, we will not have serious difficulties; but we will need to have a debate of this kind on each occasion when it is proposed to be used.
MR MOORE (11.42): This process, I believe, started in an agreement when Mr Kaine was Chief Minister. What we have before us today is a motion that is simply implementing something Mr Kaine and the Alliance Government originally agreed to. Quite clearly, when dealing with some issues it is going to be the case that a national approach will be more appropriate than an individual State approach. This appears to be one of those issues, as was a similar agreement on transport that passed through a previous Assembly and was implemented accordingly. One thing that surprises me is that Mr Stevenson has not yet spoken on this issue. Perhaps he will, and will suggest that we use this process to get rid of all of our power. Of course, he only pretends that he would like to get rid of this place and this power. The reality is that he uses it nationally much more than any of the rest of us.
When we are dealing with agricultural and veterinary chemicals, it is very important for the ACT that we do not have a situation where, because of the dangers associated with such chemicals, we take certain action and then people nick across the border to Braidwood or Yass - often we have an arrangement with Queanbeyan that such things will not happen - to pick up chemicals that we consider inappropriate. I take Mr Humphries's point that we have to be very careful how we use this power. I believe that it is being done appropriately. This is only the second occasion in five years, and both of those occasions were as a result of that conference of heads of States that Mr Kaine attended.
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